Massive Cave Found on Mars 310
mrcgran writes "Space.com is reporting a very deep hole found on Mars: 'The geological oddity measures some 330 feet (100 meters) across and is located on an otherwise bright dusty lava plain to the northeast of Arsia Mons, one of the four giant Tharsis volcanoes on the red planet. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) used its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument to draw a bead on the apparent deep hole — a feature that may cause more scientists to ponder about potential subsurface biology on Mars. Because the spot lacks a raised rim or tossed out material called ejecta, researchers have ruled out the pit being an impact crater. No walls or other details can be seen inside the hole, and so any possible walls might be perfectly vertical and extremely dark or — more likely — overhanging.' The original image and its cutout at full resolution can be found in the HiRISE site."
Purity (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, the absolute absence of albedo in the visible spectrum is stunning. I wonder if there are multi-spectral images of this site? I expect this location will be of intense study in the future as there is little more than a complete absence of something to stir the human imagination.
However, I have to disagree with the analysis in that you can see shallow walls at the very edges of the crater if you stretch the image some and examine the profiles. It also appears to match the brightness of the elevation changes from one rim of the hole to the other which should give some idea for how tall the lip of the hole is to where the "blackness" starts presuming they know the angle of the sun and lat and long. Depending upon how far up the sun can get in the sky at a different season, there may be a possibility of seeing further into the hole, presuming of course it is not a giant pool of Purity....
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Hmmmm
Oh oh
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Well, petroleum oil may very well explain why the Bush administration is so keen on spending outrageous amounts of money to send men to Mars.
Graphic Caption From TFA: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Purity (Score:4, Funny)
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This is actually the Martian UFO port.
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War of the Worlds (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Purity (Score:5, Funny)
Doh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Purity (Score:5, Funny)
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There you go, NASA, I just wrote your business case.
Re:Purity (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but all the found was a small hill. They named it Mons Pubis.
I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
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No, I'm pretty sure this proves men [flickr.com] are from Mars.
(Apologies to the poster above [slashdot.org] and the faint of stomach.)
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Cenote? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually, its where all the lost right socks and car keys in the galaxy go.
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Next up: massive cave found on... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Next up: massive cave found on... (Score:4, Funny)
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I nominate (Score:2)
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The pronunciation is NOT "your anus" (Score:3, Informative)
He starts the article with an anecdote mentioning how he once mentioned the planet 'yoo-RAY-nus' to someone only to be corrected. After checking the dictionary (he doesn't mention which one), he learned that the correct pronunciation was 'YOO-rih-nus'.
This essay is reprinted in 1988 in the anthology "The Relativity of Wrong", Pinnacle Books, ISBN 1-55817-169-X
My god! (Score:2)
Re:My god! (Score:5, Funny)
shamelessly ripped from someones sig
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Uh oh... (Score:2, Funny)
Verrrry angry indeed...
already a known and cataloged feature (Score:5, Funny)
Zapp: Behold: The Great Stone Face of Mars.
Fry: Hm.
Zapp: The only known entrance to the Martian reservation.
Leela: What about the Great Stone Ass of Mars?
Zapp: Well, yeah, but it's way over the other side of the planet.
-- Futurama, Where the buggalo roam
The black hole (Score:2)
I wonder how much tissue Mars uses in a year to wipe its hole.
Thankyou, thankyou, enough applause already.
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
Is this a story ? (Score:2)
I'm no geologist but possibly is the story how the hole was made ?
Because the spot lacks a raised rim or tossed out material called ejecta, researchers have ruled out the pit being an impact crater.
So that leaves wind(?) , water(which would be a story) but a big river at 330 feet across, X ? , Y? , Z ?. What might make this story would be some informed geological speculation. Otherwise someone has just found a hole in the ground.
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There are also lava tubes all over the planet, although that would be one monstrous lava tube.
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Nope, your not the only one. Didn't look like no cave entrance to me. I thought it was a bad CCD or what ever they are using on that camera. I'm assuming that they are smarter than me on this subject and it a cave.
cat 5 (Score:2)
Geez! They can't tell... (Score:2, Funny)
It's the planet drain hole? That's why they all died off because some knucklehead pulled the plug.
And they call themselves scientists.
This Is SPAAARTAAAA!!!!! (Score:2)
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But maybe this means we shouldn't be looking for water on Mars...
Government Cover-Up (Score:2)
Just in case, let's send Schwarzenegger to investigate.
Reminds me of this movie. (Score:2)
He uses the caves as a place to hide from the aliens.
We're doomed I tell you. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, yeah. (Score:5, Funny)
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See, the thing about grit is, it's black, and the thing about scanner-scopes,,,
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That's No Cave! (Score:5, Funny)
Weird (Score:5, Interesting)
No light is reflected back, which is kind of spooky. What can be inferred about the depth? How deep would it have to be for the HiRES camera stop sensing the light that is reflected?
It's nice and round, that's unusual. There is no crater ejecta so I'm guessing nothing hit it. I'm not a geologist, but aren't giant round holes in otherwise homogeneous flat terrain a bit uncommon?
Is there any radar in orbit with enough resolution to bounce a signal down one of these? I'm just so full of questions and awe.
I'll be checking unmanned spaceflight [unmannedspaceflight.com] for theories to these questions. Awesome site.
Re:Weird (Score:4, Informative)
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We should send some meddling kids to check it out.
The Great Blue Hole [Re:Weird] (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Blue_Hole [wikipedia.org]
Could be lots of things. (Score:4, Interesting)
At this point, as far as I can tell, there are a huge number of possibilities and no information to distinguish between them.
we've just found (Score:3, Insightful)
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Oh man (Score:2)
Re:Oh man (Score:5, Informative)
1) When your life depends on the structural integrity of your base/space station, keep it well lit. Dark corners and unlit passageways invite unobserved problems and make excellent hiding places for demonic hordes.
2) Emergency lighting is your friend. Self-contained lights that can run off batteries for days have existed since the 20th century. USE THEM.
3) Teach your space marines how to use a pistol and flashlight at the same time. Television actors pretending to be cops can do it, so can they.
4) Keep hidden compartments, passageways, and crawlspaces to a minimum. This will drastically reduce construction and maintenance costs by keeping the design simple, and make it far easier for a lone marine to save all of humanity.
5) Develop lockdown procedures. They're useful in the event of a sudden loss of pressure to prevent your entire base from leaking air out a single fracture. They can also come in handy when your absurd experiments fail and you find yourself surrounded by blood-thirsty monsters. Seal all the doors. Combine this with #4 so that they can't simply bypass the doors by crawling through unnecessarily large ventilation shafts or open ceilings.
Catastrophic Failure / Evil Overlord list (Score:2)
Floor seen on one image (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Floor seen on one image (Score:5, Informative)
I for one... (Score:2)
Upon closer inspection, scientists find ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You won. (Score:2)
One song deserves another (Score:4, Funny)
There's a hole in my planet, dear NASA, a hole.
Then fill it, dear Martian, dear Martian,
Then fill it, dear Martion, fill it.
With what shall I fill it, dear NASA, dear NASA,
With what shall I fill it, dear NASA, with what?
With crashed space probes, dear Martian, dear Martian,
With crashed space probes, dear Martian, space probes.
Leave it alone!!!! (Score:2)
At last! (Score:5, Funny)
oops (Score:2)
Martian Mordor (Score:5, Funny)
Low Gravity Base Jumping (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, the future. I really want to stick around to see as much of it as possible!
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I feel they're missing at least one obvious option (Score:3, Interesting)
It could be a structural collapse, but it's awfuly round.
thermal boreholes, anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't see any roads, farms, mines or solar collectors, though. You're never going to grow the colony and win the game without farm sectors.
Upon investigating further.. (Score:2)
Obligatory "The Far Side" cartoon reference (slightly embellished):
Upon investigating further, scientists discovered a broken piano in the large black spot (as well as thousands if not millions of missing aircraft, broken computers, loose change, small animals and socks)... it turns out that the spot the sun never shines wasn't in Iowa! It was on Mars!
Well, now we know where to stick it where the Sun don't shine.
-6d
Lava Tube (Score:5, Informative)
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1. the opening would be elongated along the axis of the tube
2. it should be more cracked and irregular since there would be little surface erosion to smooth things out
3. lava tubes tend to be fairly shallow so the bottom should be visible
4. lava tubes tend to be curved and smooth inside, so you'd expect more reflection
5. the walls would be visible on two sides and at least one of them should be getting sunlight
so except for those small issues, I would agree with you.
Re:Lava Tube (Score:4, Informative)
Possibly, but only if the size of the hole is similar to the size of the tube. If this is a shot through the "ceiling" and doesn't come close to the walls, (and if the Dena guess of 130m for the diameter of the cave is close) then this could easily be just a punched "skylight". If the tube is, in fact, even larger, then it might very well be possible to see no difference in the edges. Lava tubes, at least from the data I've seen, tend to have mostly flat ceilings and are not purely cylindrical.
2. it should be more cracked and irregular since there would be little surface erosion to smooth things out
Actually, I'd expect that with only gravity to do it's work, and if it was caused by a meteor impact, that the shape would be almost perfectly circular, with any further cracks being either covered by the pervasive Martian dust (see the Spirit and Opportunity data.) Also, impacts in stone tend not to make many cracks (see this image [istockphoto.com] for an example of how cement breaks. Admittedly volcanic basalt is not concrete, but the idea is similar. Also, how long has this cave been here? A thousand years, a million, a billion? It could be just about any of the above.
3. lava tubes tend to be fairly shallow so the bottom should be visible
Lava tubes tend to be shallow on Earth. However the Ape Cave lava tube in Washington is clearly at least as deep as it is wide [See here] [usgs.gov], and since we can't see walls on a 100m wide image, we can assume (and I know all about that word) that it might easily be 100m deep. Also, seeing the bottom depends on lots of factors. What is the angle of the sun (hard to tell from the lack of shadows) and the resulting angle to the spacecraft. There's a lot of ways to get near zero light, even given a cave only 50 meters deep.
4. lava tubes tend to be curved and smooth inside, so you'd expect more reflection
Lava tubes on Earth. Which are a few thousand years old. Look at Ape Cave in the above image and show me "smooth and shiny." I see bumpy and cracked. What happens when you expose basalt to ionizing radiation? Mars, lacking in a major magnetic field, allows a lot of radiation to impact the surface. What does that do to basalt? On the moon it makes it dark and bumpy. (see regolith)
5. the walls would be visible on two sides and at least one of them should be getting sunlight
Again, only if this hole spanned the width of the tube because of natural collapse. Lower gravity on Mars means you can have much larger air-supported structures. Lack of water or an erosion cycle means that the tube is less likely to collapse on its own. As some one else stated, these structures could act totally differently on Mars than on Earth. Perhaps on Mars, the thin, cold atmosphere leads to near immediate radiative cooling of the surface and almost all lava flows were under the surface. Once you form an insulating skin that prevents outgassing to proceed to the surface, it could be possible that a large gap would form between the ceiling of the flow and the current lava flow even without a noticable down-slope flow pool. Maybe the entire lava field is just the surface of one big bubble.
It's always dangerous to extrapolate Earth features to other planets and expect there to be no difference. This is a fascinating feature that deserves further study.
Either that, or the Martians are cloaking their secret base. One of the two...
Deep enough? (Score:2)
How deep would the hole need to be to provide a reasonable atmospheric pressure at the bottom? I realize it wouldn't be *breathable* atmosphere, but at least the pressure would be survivable.
Any ideas?
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To increase the pressure to a survivable few 100 mBar would require several kilometers...
Vacated worm home (Score:5, Funny)
Cheers.
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It's not a cave! this is not a joke thread! (Score:2)
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Finally! (Score:2)
God is Goatseing you. (Score:2)
New mission parameters (Score:2)
Dick Cheney ordered it bombed as a possible Al Qaida hideout.
Anyone else wondering... (Score:2)
It's easy to find something worth dying for. Do you have anything worth living for?
Massive? (Score:5, Insightful)
what's in there? (Score:2)
Martian Censorship (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:I don't buy it. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at the image more carefully, you can clearly see shades and highlights that suggest the terrain slopes into the hole all around. That pretty much excludes equipment faults. One possible theory is that the cavern is conical in shape, getting wider as it goes down, which would certainly explain why it's so dark.
Also remember this picture is taken from a satellite. I'm sure they'll be taking more as soon as they get an opportunity.
=Smidge=
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That's the Spirit!
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It's not made out of cheese. If it was the mice would have become a space fairing civilization long before now. I think its a watermelon and that is one of the seeds.
Right, but ... (Score:2)
Caverns of Mars III (Score:2)
This is the most exciting post about Mars in quite a while.
Well, at least since Slashdot last reported that caves had been found on Mars [slashdot.org], and then reported that again [slashdot.org].
Does this give me another excuse to praise the foresight of this computer game's [atarimania.com] creators?
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